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The conditions of committee importance – drawing lessons from a qualitative case study of Finland
No full textTheories of parliamentary committees are often contradictory and recent studies have emphasised the need for theoretically-informed qualitative analyses of committee practices. In this paper we draw from 81 interviews with Finnish politicians, party employees, and parliamentary officials to analyse seven theoretical propositions. We show that contradictory theories to hold true under different conditions, allowing individual theories to both underestimate and overestimate committee importance if the interactions between factors are not considered. Based on the findings, we argue that theories have so far overlooked variation in the level of partisanship associated with individual bills. We identify factors that influence levels of partisanship and techniques to actively manage it. Finnish committees are controlled by political parties and the government coalition, but our analysis reveals that MPs have more freedom of maneuver than previously assumed. Overall, bargaining takes places during the committee stage but not so much within formal committee meetings
Risk, the COVID-19 pandemic, and organisations: extending, repurposing, and developing theory
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic has challenged and changed organisations. While the pandemic has brought opportunities for business in some sectors, such as information and communication, and for people who enjoy the flexibility they gain from home-based or hybrid work arrangements, the realisation of benefits for individuals and organisations is uncertain over longer time periods and distributed unevenly across the workforce. Thus, the pandemic situation has been a trigger, albeit an unwelcome one, for revising our theorising about organisational risk. We build on the articles within our special section and develop a perspective on how to continue the development of new theoretical insights. First, we examine how existing theories can be extended to encompass organisational risk. We focus on theories of organisational culture to do so. Second, we discuss ways that existing theories can be repurposed to address important challenges. We illustrate our points using paradoxical leadership theory and theories of creativity. Third, we reflect on ways to develop new theorising by exploring multilevel modelling and the microfoundations of organisational risk. Fourth, we reflect on methods. In doing so, we pave the way for future studies that will enrich our understanding of organisational risk and contribute to preparations for future crises
Household disagreement about expected inflation
No full textThis chapter surveys the major facts from research on disagreement between households on what they expect inflation to be. We document them using figures and correlations that capture: the statistical regularities on the observable drivers of disagreement, the measurement of residual disagreement, the usefulness of disagreement to forecast inflation, the response of disagreement to shocks, the disagreement between households and professionals, and the relation between disagreement, risk, and uncertainty
Indentured: benefit deductions, debt recovery and welfare disciplining
No full textThe UK social security system performs an important role as a creditor and debt collector for many benefit claimants, with more affected by deductions than formal welfare conditionality or sanctions. Deductions, then, are central to understanding low‐income life in the UK. With that in mind, this paper draws on a mixed‐methods project to explore the policy rationale, administration and effects of benefit deductions at a particular moment of crisis. Through new analysis of statistical releases, I evidence increasing indebtedness and an Inverse Care Law, whereby UK social security performs worst for those who need it most. Drawing on qualitative longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the height of the cost‐of‐living crisis, I also evidence how deductions affect the lives and trajectories of low‐income claimants over time. The analysis offered details how deductions weaponize debt, often in ways that financialise benefit claimants and their entitlements that prove counter‐productive to the stated policy objectives of deductions: worsening the poverty‐debt trap and pushing people (further) away from the labour market
Mike Savage, The return of inequality. Social change and the weight of the past. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2021; xi+ 422 pp. £30.95 (hbk) £24.65 (ebook). ISBN 9780674988071
No full textGovernment as venture capitalists in artificial intelligence
No full textVenture capital plays an important role in funding and shaping innovation outcomes, characterized by investors’ deep knowledge of the technology, industry, and institutions, as well as their long-running relationships with the entrepreneurship and innovation community. China, in its pursuit of global leadership in AI innovation and technology, has set up government venture capital funds so that both national and local governments act as venture capitalists. These government-led venture capital funds combine features of private venture capital with traditional government innovation policies. In this paper, we collect comprehensive data on China’s government and private venture capital funds. We draw three important contrasts between government and private VC funds: (i) government funds are spatially more dispersed than private funds; (ii) government funds invest in firms with weaker ex-ante performance signals but these firms exhibit growth rates exceeding those of firms in which private funds invest; and (iii) private VC funds follow government VC investments, especially when hometown government funds directly invest on firms with weaker ex-ante performance signals. We interpret these patterns in light of VC funds’ traditional role overcoming information frictions and China’s unique institutional environment, which includes important frictions on mobility and information
Bulbs and biopower: managing produce and price in the age of Agri-Logistics
No full textThis paper deploys the material and discursive politics of storage as a lens into agrarian change in rural India. Focusing on onions (Allium cepa), a price volatile crop and a kitchen staple, it maps out the contested meanings of and motivations for storage among growers, governments, and agri-logistics companies. Specifically, this paper asks why storage is increasingly positioned as a key solution to the problem of price instability. This emphasis, I argue, represents a distinct regime of agrarian biopower that seeks to intervene into the physical properties of the bulb to extend its material life, and thereby, manage produce, prices, and populations. In doing so, however, fundamental issues of social inequality and guaranteed prices are bypassed. Moreover, innovations in storage technologies lay the grounds for the entry of corporate capital into agriculture. Ultimately, techno-capital-intensive biopolitical infrastructures of storage portend the restructuring of India's agrarian economy in favour of elite farmers and agri-logistics firms by circumventing the issue of a fixed and fair price for producers and consumers
Induced innovation and international environmental agreements: evidence from the Ozone Regime
No full textThis paper revisits one of the rare success stories in global environmental cooperation: the Montreal Protocol and the phase-out of ozone-depleting substances. I show that the protocol increased science and innovation on alternatives to ozone-depleting substances and argue that agreements can indeed be useful in solving global public goods problems. This contrasts with game-theoretical predictions that agreements occur only when costs to the players are low and with the often-heard narrative that substitutes were readily available. I reconcile theory and empirics by discussing the role of induced innovation in models of environmental agreements
Item response theory—a statistical framework for educational and psychological measurement
No full textItem response theory (IRT) has become one of the most popular statistical models for psychometrics, a field of study concerned with the theory and techniques of psychological measurement. The IRT models are latent factor models tailored to the analysis, interpretation and prediction of individuals’ behaviors in answering a set of measurement items that typically involve categorical response data. Many important questions of measurement are directly or indirectly answered through the use of IRT models, including scoring individuals’ test performances, validating a test scale, linking two tests, among others. This paper provides a review of item response theory, including its statistical framework and psychometric applications. We establish connections between item response theory and related topics in statistics, including empirical Bayes, nonparametric methods, matrix completion, regularized estimation and sequential analysis. Possible future directions of IRT are discussed from the perspective of statistical learning
Problems in dealing with problems: how breakdowns in corrective culture lead to institutional failure
No full textAlthough research investigating how organizational culture contributes to institutional failure has extensively conceptualized the causal factors (e.g. norms for behaving unsafely), how culture prevents such problems from being corrected is less well theorized. We synthesize theory on accidents, resilience and reliability and organizational learning to develop a conceptual model of ‘corrective culture’. This relates to distributed norms and behaviours for three interconnected elements: the detection of problems (‘identification’), appreciation of their meaning (‘interpretation’) and responses to prevent harm (‘action’). To investigate the model, and its role in institutional failure, we combined natural language processing and qualitative analysis to examine 54 UK public inquiries published during 1990–2020. Our mixed-methods analysis found that distributed malfunctions in identifying, interpreting and acting on problems cause a breakdown in organizations’ ‘corrective loops’, which enables originating problems to compound and grow (e.g. risky, unsafe or poor conduct) and cause an institutional failure. We theorize that double-loop learning is required to prevent this, whereby strong and unambiguous feedback compels organizations to acknowledge and address their problems in dealing with problems, thus enabling them to correctly identify, interpret and act on originating issues and thus prevent a spiral into failure